Years ago I somehow wound up engaging a Lunar Landing Denialist–you know, one of those strange folks who insisted that there was no way anyone actually went to the moon, the whole thing was faked, it was a soundstage, yada yada yada. I tend to have zero patience for such nonsense and I shut it down pretty much as soon as the question “If we were there, why doesn’t the Hubble Space Telescope take pictures of the landing site!” came up. I might have provided a link to someplace somewhere explaining why that’s not possible, but I don’t remember.
Luckily, though, Randall Munroe of xkcd is on the job!
The teeming stars of the globular cluster NGC 6544 glisten in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This cluster of tightly bound stars lies more than 8,000 light-years away from Earth and is, like all globular clusters, a densely populated region of tens of thousands of stars.
We don’t necessarily post space photos on Friday, but maybe we should! Here is an oblique view of Mt. Etna on Sicily (note the plume being blown away!), taken from the International Space Station, which at this point is apparently above the Black Sea. Amazing!
The rare sight of a Wolf-Rayet star – among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly detectable stars known – was one of the first observations made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022. Webb shows the star, WR 124, in unprecedented detail with its powerful infrared instruments. The star is 15,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.
Using data from NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), international researchers have uncovered new information about the Tycho supernova remnant, an exploded star in the constellation Cassiopeia, the light from which was first seen on Earth in 1572. The results offer new clues about how shock waves created by these titanic stellar explosions accelerate particles to nearly the speed of light, and reveal, for the first time, the geometry of the magnetic fields close to the supernova’s blast wave, which forms a boundary around the ejected material, as seen in this composite image. IXPE data (dark purple and white) have been combined with data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (red and blue) and overlaid with the stars in the field of view as captured by the Digitized Sky Survey.
I really do love our universe, even if it is a place that is constantly trying to kill us.
(A repost…today is the 61st anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight aboard Friendship 7.)
Image credit: NASA
Sixty years ago today, astronaut John Glenn launched in a spacecraft called Friendship 7 and became the first American to orbit the Earth. Here’s a wonderful documentary, assembled by NASA after the mission’s end, detailing the events of Glenn’s mission, from pre-launch preparations to Glenn’s post-splashdown arrival on the aircraft carrier.
I watched this film way back in third grade, when our class was doing a research project on space; I remember Mrs. Grosbeck, our teacher, looking with some dismay at the two giant film reels for this movie and realizing that we’d have to watch it in two installments. (That’s something I recall from watching educational movies in school: seeing the teacher pick up the film reel, and noting its size which would therefore indicate its length. Big film reels, meaning longer films, made us happy. If it was a small one, someone in class would say something like, “Awww, a short one.” Good times!) I’ve looked for this film on YouTube and in other places a few times over the years, and I’m thrilled that it’s finally available. I could watch archival NASA footage for hours. It reminds me that there was a time when you could read about NASA and not see the phrase “budget cuts” in the next sentence.
I love the style of this film — listen to the portentous narration, loaded with patriotic fervor and the clear belief that space exploration is obviously what’s next. “Today, John Glenn and the Mercury team challenged space…and they won!” And while all this goes on, a stirring music score throbs away in the background. A documentary like this would be dismissed today as slavish propaganda, and I suppose, in a way, that it is…but you know what, I just don’t care. Our space program in the 1960s, even though we might wish it was less motivated by a desire to beat the Soviets, was a time of greatness that we achieved because we just plain wanted it. And it saddens me to think that our era of space exploration was so short that a landmark mission, fifty years ago, now seems almost quaint.
Come on, America! Why are we messing around? The stars are awaiting us!
An international team of astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has obtained an in-depth inventory of the deepest, coldest ices measured to date in a molecular cloud. In addition to simple ices like water, the team was able to identify frozen forms of a wide range of molecules, from carbonyl sulfide, ammonia, and methane, to the simplest complex organic molecule, methanol. This is the most comprehensive census to date of the icy ingredients available to make future generations of stars and planets, before they are heated during the formation of young stars.
This image from the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) features the central region of the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which resides 630 light-years away. The cold, wispy cloud material (blue, center) is illuminated in the infrared by the glow of the young, outflowing protostar Ced 110 IRS 4 (orange, upper left). The light from numerous background stars, seen as orange dots behind the cloud, can be used to detect ices in the cloud, which absorb the starlight passing through them.
An external high-definition camera on the International Space Station captured the launch plume of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket after it had ascended to Earth orbit following its liftoff on Sunday, Jan. 15, 2023, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The space station was flying 262 miles above the Atlantic Ocean just after an orbital sunset at the time of this photograph.
